Stairway To Heaven
Well hello there. Thank you so much for joining me today for this super fun episode. I had been meaning to review this piece of cinematic architecture for a while, and I wasn’t sure when I was going to do it. But, when I saw that this week is the release of a little movie called the French Dispatch by one Wes Anderson, I knew it was time to talk about what is arguably his most popular movie - The Grand Budapest Hotel. This film was released in 2014 to both critical acclaim and box office success. Wes Anderson’s movies often use their sets and scenery as pivotal ways to create a narrative, but this is the first of his works to feature its titular subject with so much design focus. And today we are taking a look at what makes this building so magical, how it illustrates a critical time in design history and world history for that matter, and how even though the film has us traveling all over fictional Europe, we never leave the hotel for a single second.
Before we dive into the Grand Budapest hotel, let’s talk about the color of the week. We’re in the middle of October, so many decorations this year are silhouettes or cutouts. There are lots of bats and spider decor, Kourtney Kardashian is wearing black lipstick. On top of that, the days are getting shorter, the nights are getting longer, and I have found myself wearing more head to toe black than ever before. The color of the week is Vantablack. This lab created color is the darkest commercially available black and absorbs up to 99.965% of all visible light, rendering a virtual void in its place. Vantablack has been exclusively licensed to sculpture Anish Kapoor, and has many potential uses for science and technology including light protection for telescopes. Enjoy gazing into the abyss and happy spooky season!
Spoiler alert ahead, if you have not seen The Grand Budapest Hotel and want to remain in the dark until you watch, turn this episode off now and go watch the film, then come on back! Or you can let me spoil you, your choice.
So I’m a huge Wes Anderson fan, his sets and use of color and character development is magnetic every time for me, but I will say for the longest time I said that the Grand Budapest Hotel was my least favorite of his movies. One of the things I love about his early movies like Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Darjeeling Limited, all of these movies lack the traditional structure of having an antagonist and protagonist. There’s no good guy/bad guy dynamic - all the characters are presented as both lovable and flawed. And that’s really just like real life, and I think taking this approach created really interesting stories where the conflict of the movie isn’t that one person defeats the other, but that all the characters come to a deeper understanding of one another. But clearly this was too idealistic of a concept because with Grand Budapest Hotel this idea fades away and is replaced with a traditional hero versus villains set up. Adrian Brody and Willian Defoe are literally wearing black and creeping around Europe, killing old ladies and cats. But despite my criticisms, this movie is by far and away Anderson’s most successful, grossing over $172 million at the box office, more than double any of his other movies and the movie was nominated for multiple Oscars.
But I have to say, when I watched this movie again for the analysis of the hotel architecturally, I enjoyed it much more and was able to appreciate it for what it is - a quirky, fantasy movie where good defeats evil. This is done in the incredibly styled world of Adam Stockhausen, who was responsible for all the production design and used scaled models for many of the exterior shots. Now, obviously this movie came out a little while ago, and there are some really great articles looking at the sets of this film, I am linking a few of those in the show notes for your reading pleasure.
The TLDR synopsis of this movie is a hotel concierge at a luxury ski resort in a fictional European country, in the 1930’s, is framed for the murder of one of his beloved and frequent guests. There are so many themes and ideas that are present in this movie, many of them tying to the fact that while the country and much of what we see of Europe is imaginary, there is still a major war being depicted in accordance with the time period.
The story jumps around in time primarily between the 1930’s and 1968 where the story is being told to us by a former young lobby boy, now an old man and owner of the hotel. This time jump is easy to follow because we are switching from pre to post-war interiors with each time jump, and it is further punctuated by two distinct color schemes and aesthetics. Our 1968 hotel has been renovated to reflect the style of the times. There is so much mustard yellow it took me a second to even identify any other elements in the space. The lobby is double height with an all white illuminated polycarbonate ceiling. Clean sharp lines are everywhere, a variety of yellow toned wood panels cover the walls, rust and olive carpeting flow into every room, and you might notice heavily veined white and gold square marble columns that are so close to the walls, they almost look engaged with it. These columns are important to remember for later. This same white and gold marble wraps up a central and symmetrical grand stair, that splits in opposite directions after the first landing, with a concierge desk punctuating this juncture. The space is accessorized with bold white on black signage, with an over-scaled sans-serif font that allows the whole space to feel less like an out dated municipal building and more like a museum exhibit. The look and feel of this 1968 space is very much in line with postwar Eastern European Brutalist interiors. It’s meant to be depressing when compared to the original 1930’s hotel, but it still feels playful and tongue-in-cheek. I would still totally stay at this hotel.
Our narrator begins his story, and we are transported back in time to the 1930’s version of the hotel. We get a great exterior shot of one of the miniature models made for the movie, and we can see the hotel is approximately nine floors high. The facade is some kind of stacked stone with quoining details at the corners, and its fully enveloped in a soft pink gradient. This coloration is more evocative of a 1990’s Miami, but it’s another one of the details that helps this fairly serious story and setting feel light, fun, and even joyful. There is a blue mansard roof punctured with dormer windows, two symmetrically placed turrets with spires on top, rows of arched windows, and an arched marquee with the hotels name above the center of the very top floor that gets fully illuminated by spot lights at night. The building is a picture perfect depiction of old luxury travel lifestyle, and Anderson said he used the Library of Congress’s Photochrome Print Collection as a point of inspiration. This collection includes images of travel, landscapes, architecture, and daily life in Europe from the 1890’s through the 1910’s. Architecturally speaking, the building is relying on a mix of styles, but the primarily forms are mostly Second Empire Baroque Revival, with the building’s large scale, mansard roof, symmetrically, and classic detailing. This was the most prevalent style of architecture in Europe in the late 19th century, so the timeline and usage all tracks. Well done.
The hotel’s 1930’s interior is vastly different from 1968. The lobby has seemingly doubled in size, now including an atrium skylight going up four floors. There’s additional lounge seating areas, a barbershop, a bar, and a lot more bustling hotel guests and staff. This expansion of the space immediately makes it feel more like a luxury hotel, and this is emphasized by a shift in color scheme. The rust and olive green are gone, and we are now seeing more regal red tones in the carpets, more light creme and blush tones. Unlike the hodge-podge staff from 1968, the 1930’s workers are all dressed in matching eggplant colored uniforms. There are decorative chandeliers and delicate wall scones, and our friends the white and gold marble columns remain just the same, except they are no longer anywhere near the walls, but completely freestanding. Our central grand stair remains almost completely unaltered, but it’s surrounded by a baby grand piano and landscape murals. The idea that the lobby would have shrunk in size over 40 years makes complete sense. Overtime, as the economy slowed after the war, I can see areas of the lobby being closed off and used for other things. A grand lobby starts to feel like a waste of space when you start to count pennies. The skylight and atrium could easily have been damaged and proved to be too expensive to repair and maintain, so they simply closed it off. It happens all the time in the real world too.
The white and gold stone columns and staircase remain in both timelines, as a point of orientation, but also as a point of practicality. These lobby scenes were filmed in an old German department store, and the columns and stair are actually part of this space. The majority of the other elements we see were added in as part of the set design. Adam Stockhausen sited Jugendstil as being his primary influence for the film’s aesthetic. Jugendstil is basically the German counter part to Art Nouveau. It is a decorative arts and architectural movement that was inspired by the abstraction of floral motifs and rebelled against the rigidity of Neo-classicism. So you’ll see lots of curved elements, things that look vaguely like plants, and a little of the stepped ziggurat forms common in Art Deco. This is mostly apparent in the details, graphics, and signage in the movie. For example, the 1930’s hotel, the main entrance has a pedal shaped awning and sign that is almost an exact replica of the Art Nouveau Paris subway entrances by Hector Guimard.
The movie is divided into 6 parts, and by part 2, we’ve left the hotel and started on an adventure to prove our protagonist’s innocence, but the hotel stays with us. The protagonists take a train that is carrying the same red-orange color from the hotel lobby carpets, and still dressed in their purple uniforms, it feels like we haven’t left at all. We first arrive at the Schloss Lutz estate for a reading of the deceased’s will. This estate, while a single family home, is said to belong to one of the wealthiest families in Europe and therefore is practically a mirror image of the hotel itself, just in size alone. The entrance is a dark twin of the hotel’s lobby, with a central grand stair the splits in opposite directions after the first landing, only this one is clad in super dark wood with ornate carvings, no relief anywhere for the eye, and no signs of joy. We’re scared, and rightfully so because the surviving family members serve as our antagonists, and by entering their world, we’ve crossed over into some kind of Black Lodge experience of the hotel. Now in hindsight, Madame D, the owner of the Schloss Lutz estate and also the secret owner of the Grand Budapest Hotel may have had an affinity for this type of stair case and used it in all her properties. Or maybe there’s more to it.
Our protagonist is swiftly and wrongfully jailed for the murder of Madame D. He makes himself useful in jail, and finds a group of inmate friends who have a plan to bust out. One of the friends has drawn a meticulous plan and sectional elevation of the prison that rivals the work of some architectural students in its precision and clarity. And while it’s only splashed on the screen for a few seconds, what it reveals is that the prison itself is another carbon copy of the Grand Budapest Hotel. We see the same mansard roof with dormer windows, the same symmetrical turrets, the same multi-floor atrium, with the jail cells standing in for hotel rooms. The main difference being the prison is surrounded by an alligator filled moat. And of course we are missing our grand stair in this instance, but the similarities are too aligned to go unnoticed. Three of our main settings are all echos of each other, the Schloss Lutz estate, the Checkpoint 19 prison, and the hotel itself are all the same character dressed in different clothing. This re-use of the basic set layout makes the movie feel more like we are watching a play, where efficient set repurposing is critical to the timing of the show. This is a reoccurring structure for Anderson’s films and is referred to more directly in the movie Rushmore. But, like our friends the white and gold columns, this technique also provides a sense of continuity and reference, and with the fast paced dialogue and quick edits, it helps keep us grounded through what is actually a very action packed and tragic, cheery little movie.
Lastly, as I was looking at the characteristics of the hotel, I noticed it’s really no different that the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s the Shining. Brightly colored, enormous resort, covered in snow, but one feels like a hipster Disneyland and the other feels like a demonic hallucination. A lot of this comes down to non-set related film elements like the music, framing, and the pace of each films, but the idea that both movies essentially take place in the same setting and yet feel completely different is wild.
If you’ve made it this far, congratulations! You have the reward of hearing that this episode is brought to you by Soft Landing Studio. The same design studio that creates this podcast. If you enjoy this podcast and want to work with me directly, you can select from a variety of one-on-one virtual consoultations about your specific home, office, or retail interior design project. Whether you want a quick brainstorming session, a series of regular check-ins during your renovation, or to work with my full interior design services; you’ll get amazing design ideas, life changing solutions to problems you’d never thought you could resolve, and a space you feel proud to call your own. And just in time for the very start of the holiday season, and yes I count Halloween as part of the holiday season, you can now purchase gift certificates for the 45 minute Creative Consultation brainstorming sessions. This is the perfect gift for the design lover or brand new home owner in your life. Go to www.softlandingstudio.com to schedule your experience now. And while you’re there, don’t forget to download the absolutely free Guide to Getting Started. This fun-fill PDF quiz will orient you at the very beginning of your interior design journey. If you know you aren’t 100% happy in your space, but you don’t know what to do about it, this guide is for you. You will be directed towards big idea solutions, so you’ll know what to do, and most importantly, what not to do. Visit www.softlandingstudio.com for you free copy today.
Thank you so much for joining me, I can’t wait to talk to you in the next episode.
